The Alliance College-Ready Public Schools Foundation is an eight-person team supporting 25–28 schools and approximately 13,000 scholars. More than half the team needed to be cultivating donors, while manual administrative work kept pulling attention back inside.
$126K and 412% are modeled opportunities from the assessment. They are not presented as realized savings.
Administrative work was crowding out relationships
Disconnected tools created duplicate entry. Manual work consumed leadership time. Important knowledge stayed in individual heads instead of somewhere the whole team could find and use it.
Tools did not talk to each other
Information had to be moved or entered again between separate systems.
Administrative work filled the week
Recurring tasks kept people from donor cultivation and relationship-building work.
Knowledge lived with individuals
Without shared guides and records, important context depended on who happened to know it.
The team needed evidence
People needed a shared, credible reason to decide how to use AI safely.
“More than 50% of our eight-person team needs to be out in the field getting money. The problem is right now we don’t really have any automations—everything is done manually, double entry.” — Dulce Appiagyei, Director of Operations
A collaborative assessment
Over four weeks, Clearworks mapped the major workflows, interviewed and surveyed all eight staff members, cataloged friction, reviewed integration opportunities, and prioritized the highest-value moves. The work began with the mission constraint—freeing people for relationships—rather than with a catalog of AI tools.
The assessment translated internal frustration into shared evidence leadership could evaluate together.
From frustration to a decision path
The immediate result was clarity and buy-in: agreement that manual work was a shared organizational constraint, a quantified view of the cost of inaction, and a sequenced roadmap. Early moves included an AI policy, meeting transcription, a centralized SOP hub, and a 90-day implementation path.
“The audit was really crucial to bring a third-party perspective. It helped illuminate that we need to integrate AI—and gave us the language to get buy-in from the people we needed.” — Dulce Appiagyei
What this means for another organization
Small teams do not need a long list of automations. They need agreement about which administrative work is displacing the mission, evidence strong enough to support a decision, and a pace of change the team can absorb.
Give the mission its time back.
Start with the workflow that keeps people away from relationships.